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Transference
The Wounded Healer Psychotherapist
Read the real story of how psychotherapists came to do this work.
Posted October 9, 2016 Reviewed by Ekua Hagan
Those of you who have been in psychotherapy may have wondered about how and why your therapist came to do this work. Some of you who have benefitted from psychotherapy may have even begun to think you'd like to do this work yourself. That is how many of us got started.
Ever since the mid-eighties, there has been a growing interest in the personal lives of psychotherapists. There is a myth, which contains some truth, that psychotherapists are emotionally disturbed people, which is what attracts them to do the work they do.
Long before I began thinking of the concept of the wounded healer, I was well aware that a number of colleagues whom I had gotten to know fairly well had been deeply hurt in their lives, just as I had been. I owe the concept of celebrating the wounded healer to Peter Martin (2011), a British psychologist who had a depressive breakdown and stopped seeing clients for six months. When he published his story, it produced responses from therapists who wanted to write about their lives. He interviewed 17 of them in his paper "Celebrating the Wounded Healer." Martin thought that although woundedness is just another metaphor for our humanness, for many psychotherapists, it is a hidden secret, a deceit often masked as "professionalism." Yet for most of us, most of the time, this awareness is a secret, something to be apologised for and quickly forgotten in favor of a quick return to so-called "normal life."
The helping professions such as medicine, nursing, psychology, psychiatry, social work, speech therapy, physical therapy, occupational therapy, and the clergy have more than their share of wounded healers. Remember Gregory House, MD from the television series House? He is the best-known wounded healer in popular culture. House limps through the hospital with his walking stick, the concrete sign of his woundedness. Underlying the concept of the wounded healer is the notion that the experience of having been wounded will somehow increase his empathy for others, but House’s empathy does not increase. He walks around as if he is God; his narcissism is infuriating. He embodies the best and worst aspects of being a physician. Brilliant at diagnosing the most complex illness, he arrogantly flaunts his acumen, delivering a diagnosis or prognosis with brutality. He exemplifies the four different types of wounded healers: the healer who both wounds and heals, the healer who has walked close to death and recovered, the healer who bears a permanent wound, and the healer who heals through his wounds.
I am a wounded healer and had thought tentatively about sharing more of my experience but feared being stigmatized and shamed. But not identifying myself made it seem that I had something shameful to hide. Then I thought about some well-known brave people in the mental health field who disclosed their woundedness and went on to heal others. They include Kay Redfield Jamison, Lauren Slater, and Marsha Linehan.
We psychotherapists ask patients to disclose painful personal experiences so that they can begin to recover. At a time when people are more candidly coming out about their own struggles in life, we in the mental health field have been conspicuously silent for fear of being stigmatized. Therapists are often expected to be immune to the kind of problems that they help clients through and often try to project that persona.
Recovering from these painful experiences is an ongoing process. Even though our own psychotherapy or psychoanalysis helped us heal, disclosing this experience continues the healing process. Psychotherapy is a two-way process in which both patient and psychotherapist are changed. In The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients, Irvin Yalom described the patient and therapist as "fellow travelers, both on a journey of discovery together."
The rationale for all this secrecy about the analyst derives from traditional thinking that much of the psychoanalyst's healing power comes from observing and analyzing the transference, those interpersonal attitudes and expectations learned early in life that the patient unconsciously transfers to the therapist. The transference may be positive, as in assuming the therapist will be interested and caring, or negative, as in assuming the therapist will be uncaring, competitive, or shaming, and is quite revealing about how the patient sees others. When the analyst interprets the transference, thus making these unconscious assumptions conscious, it frees the patient to relate to himself and others more realistically. This is the origin of Freud’s tabula rasa or blank screen concept, meaning the less the patient knows about the therapist leaves more room for him to form a transference.
My own experience over the years has told me, however, that transference forms with or without the therapist's intentional self-disclosure. Common sense tells us it is impossible for the therapist to be a blank screen. Our demeanor, gender, appearance, accent, race, ethnicity, location, and decoration of the office all provide patients with personal information that allows them to infer the therapist's socioeconomic status, his formality or lack of it, his warmth, frustration tolerance, and many other qualities. Simply by our look of recognition or lack of it, we show whether we are familiar with the movie, restaurant, book, music, or slang the patient brings to the dialogue. And of course, when he wants to know more about his therapist, there is always the Internet and googling.
Many believe that the judicious use of self-disclosure, when done to meet the needs of the patient, adds a most human and needed dimension in therapy and can enhance the attachment bond. Self-disclosure in psychotherapy evolved from the concept of a two-person psychology in which the mind of both patient and therapist are constantly engaged in a cross-fertilization. Like all human beings we psychotherapists need self-respect and have a healthy need to be known, to feel connected to others, appreciated, and respected. We all have a story to be told.
As James McLaughlin (1995) said, "what each of us needs from the other ... is at depth pretty much the same. We need to find in the other an affirming witness to the best that we hope we are, as well as an accepting and durable respondent to those worst aspects of ourselves that we fear we are."
To order my new book, Celebrating the Wounded Healer Psychotherapist: Pain, Post-Traumatic Growth and Self-Disclosure at a 20% discount, email me at Sharonkfarber@gmail.com.
